


New World

by Alex_Quine



Category: Hidalgo (2004), Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-02
Packaged: 2018-03-16 00:12:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3467240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alex_Quine/pseuds/Alex_Quine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A holodeck is a dangerous toy, as far as McCoy is concerned and training can go too far.</p>
            </blockquote>





	New World

 

At medical school, he’d worked with holographic cadavers in his freshman year, some of which talked back to you if you put a scalpel wrong. Then there’d been Dipso Dave, the virtual drunk, who’d turn up in the college A&E with a variety of cuts and fractures for the students to practice stitching and pinning on. At the time he’d been grateful to have the chance to try stuff out before he risked hurting a flesh and blood patient and once or twice had found himself slapping ‘Dave’ on the shoulder to tell him he’d be fine but this thing, this holodeck, took his breath away and made his skin crawl at the same time.

One two-year tour for the Enterprise and she’d been retrofitted with the holodeck at their next full maintenance check. Scotty had been both alarmed by the power it took from the engines and bubbling with excitement at how it operated. Jim had squared his jaw a mite as the admiral explained what Starfleet expected from the Enterprise crew in terms of testing its usefulness for training and behind him McCoy could see Sulu and Chekhov surreptitiously flicking through the descriptions of the half dozen programs loaded into its memory.

He knew that the others would see his reluctance to embrace its delights as the ‘old man’ being stubborn. No matter that Scotty had assured them that it was set so that no character encountered in the programs could hurt them, it wasn’t just physical hurts that made him uneasy; the feelings that had engulfed him that first time they’d run an outdoor program frightened him. The beach had seemed endless, with fine, white, sand, and turquoise waters and the cloudless sky – it was so high above him that the return, an hour later, to the sealed metal rat-runs on the Enterprise, where he could touch every corridor ceiling, had almost brought on his old claustrophobia. Ensign Clark had become so distressed that McCoy had sedated her.   After a de-brief with the senior officers Jim had decided not to run something so close to their personal experience again for the time being.

Of course, Spock had been unmoved by it, or if he had been, McCoy couldn’t tell. The Vulcan had walked on the beach, but steadfastly evaded all attempts to get him into the water. Thinking about it, McCoy wasn’t sure if Vulcans ever learnt to swim, but Jim hadn’t been able to persuade him to so much as paddle. Anyway, they’d decided, for the next trial to run one of the historical programs. It was supposed to be an exercise in first contact with primitive societies and after some discussion Jim had selected the ‘Frontier America’ program, where their pre-knowledge was probably a tangle of half-remembered facts, misinformation and myth, not unlike some of the briefings they were sent about new planets, thought McCoy sourly.

They all had to select a role to take on and whilst McCoy couldn’t see any further than being a doctor, equipt with frighteningly little in the brown leather bag he’d been given, Spock had surprised him by joining the small group stood before the doors of the holodeck suite, dressed in loose brown trousers and a white shirt with brown ribbon sleeve garters. There was a battered straw boater on his head, a long duster coat thrown over his shoulder and he was carrying what McCoy recognised as an early camera on a big wooden tripod, one of the ones where you had to duck under a black cloth to take the picture. Spock saw him looking at it.

“Since I am to be separated from my tricorder, this seemed like a logical alternative,” he said coolly.

McCoy had wondered whether that all enveloping black hood was really a mask to hide the Vulcan’s distinctive features, but in truth none of the holographic characters had seemed to see anything different about him and instead, McCoy had found himself grinning involuntarily at the way that the heavy material mussed his hair. At one point, Spock, surrounded by small boys wanting their picture taken, had seen him smiling and paused for a moment, one eyebrow raised, until McCoy had half lifted his hand in greeting and wandered off across the street, to sit on a rocker on the hotel’s veranda, his bag at his side, to watch the world go by.

Afterwards, he wondered if he’d made his life more difficult by sticking to what he thought he knew, but in such a different world. Some of the Enterprise crew had made similar choices; Uhura was working on the town’s newspaper and from down the street, he could hear the ringing of Scotty’s hammer on the blacksmith’s anvil. Others had gone a different route, trying out something new and just now he could see the boys from the Bar-L ranch, Jim and Chekhov amongst them, riding into town for their weekly mix of beer and poker and a few came for a bath at the Temperance Hotel and the Sunday service.

The group were approaching from the east, their faces caught by the setting sun, so that they must have been half dazzled, when the sound of a running horse came from the other end of the street and a paint flashed past him, its rider slumped over the horn of his saddle, and barrelled into the group of riders. There were shouts and cries as men and horses went down in a heap.

McCoy was out of his chair and running, but Spock beat him to it and was hanging on to the reins of the paint, which had scrambled to its feet, sweating and snorting. The Bar-L boys seemed to have picked themselves up, with a dealing of swearing, but the paint’s rider was still slumped on the ground. McCoy could see a smear of red down the pony’s shoulder.

It was as he went to turn the man over, that McCoy felt a sickening heave to his stomach.

“That’s Frank Hopkins!” said a Bar-L hand, “he’s been riding despatch for the army.”

“Someone find the Sheriff,” McCoy said curtly.

“Bones, you need a hand?”

Jim was kneeling beside him and together they gently straightened out the figure’s limbs and rolled it over onto its back.

McCoy wouldn’t look at the man’s face; he’d seen it before, had seen the life drain from it and now he silently cursed the programmers for this was no ‘Dave’, all fuzzy edges and standard issue sweats, this silent figure had hazel eyes and high cheekbones, a small scar on his top lip and gapped white teeth that had grinned at him the first time, when he’d hobbled into Bones’ office with peritonitis and a sadly misguided faith, thought McCoy bitterly, in his abilities. At the end, there had been what looked chillingly like forgiveness in the gentle eyes that had cut McCoy to the quick.

This time it looked like a bullet wound to the shoulder and a long, slow bleed, but he’d not be able to tell until he got the man stripped. His hands clenched despite himself; the blood-soaked cloth felt real beneath his fingers.

“It would be advantageous to move your patient laying flat,” came Spock’s laconic tones and McCoy, glancing upwards, saw that from somewhere the Vulcan had exchanged the sidling pony for a canvas stretcher. Dumbly, he nodded and shuffled back so that Frank could be lifted onto it. He supported the rider’s head and felt a faint warmth leaching from his skin and two-day old stubble that pricked his fingertips.

They were trudging towards the hotel when the Sheriff arrived and tried to go through Frank’s pockets for any papers he might be carrying, but McCoy was having none of it.

“You can come and watch me work, take anything we find on him, but we’ll be going now, Sheriff.”

The Sheriff had sniffed and waved forward a deputy who took over one end of the stretcher, but even so it seemed like a tortuously long journey before they had him laid out on the long scrubbed table in the hotel’s old billiard room, which now saw service as McCoy’s office.

The fingers were chilled, but there was a faint pulse at the wrist McCoy was holding and when he looked up again and saw Spock standing there, he waved him over and handed him Frank’s arm, saying briskly,

“Here, use those magical Vulcan digits and keep a check on his pulse…anything under forty beats per minute and I want to know.”

“I fail to understand, Dr. McCoy, why a man of Earth science should believe in magic,” said Spock, nevertheless McCoy saw his head tilt a little and knew that the Vulcan was attending silently to his task.

With Jim helping, McCoy had the clothing off the unconscious figure down to some red woollen longjohns and had laid bare a gunshot wound in one shoulder, before he broke a glass vial of smelling salts under Frank’s nose and the figure choked and spluttered into life. Behind them, McCoy could hear the deputy going through Frank’s clothing.

McCoy saw Frank’s eyes open a little and focus and saw a measure of recognition come into Frank’s face.

“Hi Doc,” he murmured.

McCoy swallowed and waved forward Jim who had found a cup of water and let a few drops fall onto dust-covered lips before wiping the muck away gently.

“Howdie, Frank,” the deputy butted in between them, “were you carrying papers? There’s nothing here.”

“Oil-cloth packet, under the saddle blanket,” Frank whispered, “they got the saddlebag, tell….”

“Tell, tell who?” the deputy wanted to know, but Frank’s eyelids were fluttering shut again and this time McCoy would brook no delay or interference and had Jim turn him out of the room. The deputy had almost collided with Scotty in the doorway carrying a pan of steaming water, with a couple of folded sheets over his arm, and followed by Chekhov with McCoy’s brown bag.

“I want a couple of pints of a saline solution, 7.5% or as close as you can manage it,” he said grimly and Scotty disappeared out the door again.

McCoy took the bag. There was precious little in it he could use in this situation except some long-nosed forceps that Scotty had fashioned out of fence wire.

“You got any chloroform?” Jim asked, scanning the shelves of bottles and jars.

“They were using ether and I’ve no way to gauge his blood pressure, so that’s too dangerous. He’s out cold right now and I want to get the slug out if I can before he comes round.”

All the while he had been running the forceps through the flame of an oil-lamp. Jim replaced the glass chimney and held it close by to light up the scene as he bent over the limp body. Once or twice he glanced up and Spock would nod briefly, so he carried on.

It was a single shell and came out, thankfully, in one piece. McCoy cauterized some small blood vessels with a hot needle before sluicing out the wound with salt water. He didn’t want to sew it up until he’d got some fluids into the man and could see if there was an uncontrollable bleed somewhere deeper in the shoulder, could see if he’d lost so much blood that the saline diluted it beyond where it would clot safely. In the meantime, he had Chekhov put a couple of thick medical dictionaries under Frank’s heels.

It was as they were stood waiting for the saline to pass into Frank’s veins that McCoy found himself staring at the man’s face, wiped clean for now of pain, and began to tremble. Scotty, Jim and Chekhov had gone and he was left with Spock and the silent figure lying on the bench.

“This is crazy,” he muttered, giving himself a shake. “It’s a machine, dammit!”

“Nevertheless, your concern is logical,” said Spock clearly. “Your skills as a human medical practitioner are enhanced by a connection to your patient.”

“My patient isn’t human!” McCoy snapped.

“This program is designed to enhance intellectual training with simulations of real-life situations which operate on your human emotions.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as just a little devious?”

McCoy was beginning to feel something akin to anger building up inside him but before he could elaborate or Spock could reply, Frank began to cough and gasp and opened his eyes once again.

“Hi Doc,” he murmured.

“You said that before. Now clam up, whilst I take off this dressing.”

The wound was still bleeding, but sluggishly, and McCoy was satisfied that it was safe to sew it up. He knew that Frank’s gaze had not left his face and it was as his fingers brought the needle towards Frank’s flesh that he said, “This’ll hurt,” quietly.

McCoy heard the hiss of breath through Frank’s teeth as he began to sew, as quickly as he was able; a half-dozen stitches later, he’d tipped a couple of fingers of whiskey over the closed wound and bound it up. By this time, Frank’s lips were pressed tightly together and McCoy could see a film of sweat on his brow.

They had lifted him down then and stretched him out on the old leather sofa, placed a small pillow beneath his head and a blanket up to his waist and left him there to sleep a while.

McCoy was taking the bowl of bloody water to throw it out of the back door, realised that Spock was still following him and spun around to confront him.

“What?” he snapped.

“You know, Doctor, that you can stop the program at any time.”

“I can’t do that,” McCoy snarled, “can’t just abandon him…it’s just…dammit!”

Spock paused for a moment, one eyebrow raised. Then he took the basin from McCoy’s hands and tipped out the water. Both of them watched it trickle across the yard until it found some cracks in the baked earth and disappeared from sight.

“The emotions that you humans struggle to control are not an illusion in this world or any other, therefore to experience them and to perform your duties despite their interference must be accounted a strength surely?”

McCoy set his jaw and refused to reply. Spock carried on.

“For a Vulcan eliminating emotion from our lives and decision-making is a strength, and those occasions on which we are tested by others and pass that test are…satisfying. Your patient has reached out to your humanity and despite being in a strange world you have responded as the capable doctor that I believe you to be and in so doing you will have gained. In some respects, Doctor, we are similar…”

“Is that so?” McCoy said dryly.

“Indeed,” Spock said quietly, “for the more we share, the more we have.”

He turned then and left McCoy standing at the open doorway and as the tall figure disappeared from view, McCoy found himself wondering whether the Vulcan wasn’t just a little more human than he knew.

**Author's Note:**

> I began to write an occasional Star Trek/Hidalgo crossover AU some time back, but this weekend's sad news of the passing of Leonard Nimoy, whose character was truly the conscience of the series, made me think back to seeing the original t.v. series for the first time.


End file.
